I just returned from ALA Annual 2016 in Orlando, Florida, and besides enjoying more temperate weather I’ve also been thinking about some of what I experienced there. One experience in particular stands out. Every ALA in recent years my employer (OCLC) has sponsored a “Linked Data Roundtable” where practitioners discuss their cutting edge work with […]

As reported in the Economist, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is trying to go global. That is, it is attempting to shed any remaining ties to an individual country (*cough* the US) and become truly independent. I heartily welcome this, as no country should be able to control something that has […]

Slinging across my Twitter feed came this: “HTTP is obsolete. It’s time for the distributed, permanent web.” Intrigued, I went to take a look. It wasn’t long before my jaw dropped open. What the post was describing was a nascent technology and protocol that was like a combination of the best parts of BitTorrent and […]

Those who have labored in the database orchard know about CRUD. It isn’t the stuff you scraped off your shoe, but a set of operations that must be supported for typical database maintenance: C = Create a record. R = Read a record. U = Update a record. D = Delete a record. Then Linked Data […]

One Format to rule them all, One Format to find them; One Format to bring them all and in the darkness bind them. – with apologies to J.R.R. Tolkien It is now over 12 years since I wrote “MARC Must Die” in Library Journal. At the time that I wrote it, I think that I imagined […]

The Library of Congress has now made specific recommendations on the best file formats for preserving access to content of various types: Textual works and musical compositions Still images Audio Moving images Software, electronic games, and learning modules Datasets and databases They take pains to explain that these recommendations are not meant to replace their […]

The Mozilla Foundation’s new Web Literacy Standard is intended to serve as a roadmap for competent Web use and comprising “the skills and competencies people need to read, write, and participate effectively on the Web,” according to Mozilla’s site.

Christopher Harris believes that board gaming is a strong contender to become the “Next Big Thing” in schools. Yet no sector of education has laid claim to it. Could libraries be the place where gaming flourishes?

The Douglas County Libraries’ (DCL) pioneering project to own, rather than license, much of its e-content has not only forged a new business model but also exposed a new frontier in metadata. As of March, about 22,000 of the library’s nearly 58,000 e-content titles had been purchased directly from publishers and stored on an Adobe Content Server (ACS), and it became quickly apparent to library staff that we were going to have to get creative with the metadata associated with this material.